The Last Word On Nothinghttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com
"Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor HugoTue, 03 Mar 2015 16:35:40 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Abstruse Goose: Technical Assistancehttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/03/03/abstruse-goose-technical-assistance/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/03/03/abstruse-goose-technical-assistance/#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 09:00:27 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9277[…]]]>I’ve just been through several bouts of technical assistance and I have to say that 1) the ESL problem still exists but is much better than it used to be; and 2) a new sentence in their checklist is “Why yes, we can fix that;” 3) the last one thanked me for being such a pleasant customer which 3a) didn’t sound like a sentence on the checklist and 3b) made me wonder just how non-pleasant their customers usually are; and 4) given that tech assistance is so unremittantly polite, I’ve resolved to save all telephonic unpleasantness for the rat bastards who say they’ll take you off their list but who have an infinity of lists.

_______

This Abstruse Goose ishttp://abstrusegoose.com/136. But I have worrying news: AG hasn’t added any cartoons in a number of months. Come back, Abstruse Goose, we love you.

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/03/03/abstruse-goose-technical-assistance/feed/0Science Needs Cool Kidshttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/03/02/science-needs-cool-kids/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/03/02/science-needs-cool-kids/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 09:00:58 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9392[…]]]>I was not cool in high school. I think it would be a stretch to say I was a nerd, but I wasn’t cool and I certainly wasn’t getting laid.

No, like so many scientists and science writers in the world, I mostly kept my head down and waited for college. You see, it’s in college (or maybe even grad school) that most science-loving students come into their own, go to parties and have sex. We have to wait for an environment where understanding game theory or the Krebs cycle makes for engaging conversation rather than a reason to shove us in our lockers.

Now, I’m not complaining, it all shakes out pretty well in the end. The nerds create billion-dollar companies and win Nobel prizes while the high school cool kids occasionally become action stars but mostly fizzle out. But here’s the thing. The rise of popular pseudoscience in society has convinced me that we need to change all this.

As a nation, we need to recruit the cool kids into science, technology, engineering, and math. Our very future depends on it.

It’s time to stop thinking that the debate over evolution, climate change, vaccines and genetically modified organisms will be worked out through logic and reasoning. Anyone who can be reasoned with is already on our side. And even then, we’re lucky to break 50 percent of the American public siding with clear scientific consensus. So it’s time to start coming up with radical solutions. We need to hire the cool kids.

I would argue – and to a large extent sociology and psychology nerds agree with me – that people believe celebrities because they want to be them. Aspiration breeds trust.

Take the latest vaccination troubles. On the one side you have the vast majority of the world’s nerds – thoughtful, acerbic, huge Battlestar Gallactica fans. On the other, you have Jenny McCarthy, a former high school cheerleader who wore her school sweater for a Playboy spread. She doesn’t have logic or expertise on her side, all she has is aspirational appeal.

The average person (perhaps not the people who read this blog, mind you) sees McCarthy and wants to be her. Psychology tells us this is extremely powerful. Believe it or not, there is a long history of fascinating science on this topic – done by brilliant men and women who likely were not getting laid in high school. Studies have shown that after steroid-infused slugger Mark McGuire (who was definitely getting laid in high school) broke the home run record, people were more likely to consider using the supplements he claimed gave him his bulk.

And it’s not new. No high schooler in history was cooler than Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli. And after just one stupid episode of Happy Days where The Fonz gets a library card, the US library system was overwhelmed by requests for library cards. In Nigeria contraception use in the 90s shot up a quarter after a popular singer released songs saying it was a good idea. And of course there’s the infamous 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate where the latter properly understood the power of television.

Marketers have studied this for decades. According to marketing psychologists (who definitely were not getting laid in high school), if a celebrity’s image matches a person’s “ideal self-image,” they are far more likely to believe him/her and buy whatever they are hawking.

And we don’t even have to be conscious of it. One clever team of marketing researchers even digitally blended Tiger Woods and George W Bush until they came up with a face that was a bizarre mix of the two. People intrinsically rated that face as oddly trustworthy, even though they couldn’t recognize it. Then the researchers upped the ante. They added just 35% of Tiger’s features to a random stock photo model and subjects reported trusting the Tiger-enhanced version more than the original.

Tiger Woods, I should mention, was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in high school.

This is who we are. It’s about time we got used to it. Now, it’s not that science doesn’t have its cool kid advocates. As a science writer, I appreciate Kristen Bell supporting vaccines and George Clooney backing mainstream climate science. Really, thanks guys. But then when we meet the actual experts doing the work, and all we can think is, “God, I want to shove that guy into a trash can to shut him up.”

The future of climate change now has nothing to do with good science. It has to do with winning an argument. And it’s an argument, I hate say, we seem to be losing.

Look, I don’t like having to write this. I truly wish that the climate change, vaccine, and evolution debate could be won purely on evidence. But we need to face the fact that if they could be, they would have been by now. These debates have moved beyond the science realm and into the public and political ones. The realm where tribe and identity matter more than data. Where the spokesman matters more than the speech.

And look at the spokesmen we choose. No disrespect to Bill Nye or Alan Alda – it’s fair to say that they are the “ideal self-image” of many nerds of my generation. But we already have those people on our side.

Nor is it going to be someone like me – a gangly kid who didn’t impress girls until he grew into his frame in his mid-20s. No, we need to cultivate a whole new crop of spokesmen and women. We need to offer science scholarships to cheerleaders and football stars. We need to create special science classes for prom kings and queens. We need to offer free science tutoring to teenagers who frequent the local family planning clinic.

Unless…

Maybe they are already out there. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe hidden in laboratories and in front of chalkboards around the world there are scores of undiscovered hot, charismatic scientists hiding from the spotlight. People who mainstream America actually wants to be.

If you are a virologist who is secretly high school prom royalty, stand up. If you had lots of sex under the bleachers at 17 and today spend your days programming climate models, raise your hand. Guys, shave that scraggly beard, go to Banana Republic and buy a V-neck sweater that actually fits you. Women, wax the brows and get a Brazilian blow-out.

Embrace your inner cool kid. And I don’t mean nerd cool, I mean actual cool. Aspirational cool. And if, like me, you don’t have such a person inside you, don’t talk bad about colleagues who do. We need these people. Because God knows the pseudoscience nut jobs will take them if we don’t.

Author’s Note: I cannot take credit for the hygiene recommendations at the end. They come directly from a frustrated communications officer at an large, undisclosed, independant laboratory. This person also recommended proper deoderant.

The utterance, “There will be a quiz on this” is notorious for striking panic into a roomful of students, but for me it holds the key to my strongest motivation. I am so much more likely to read a textbook chapter that will be followed by a pat on the back in the form of smug circling of correct letters. Not a test, mind you – not an essay, not an exam – but a quiz. Preferably of the multiple-choice variety.

Perhaps it’s the comparative ease of recognition – identifying the correct choice – over recall (coming up with the right technical term to fill in a blank) that provides what enigmatologists have identified as a primal reward. Behavioral game designers schedule these rewards optimally – a bonus round here, an achievement unlocked there – so that the brain never suffers the frustration of dopamine withdrawal during game play, and that iPad becomes nigh on impossible to put down.

So if you’ve been reading the Last Word on Nothing for the past year or more and have been waiting to feel vindicated for all that time spent, here’s a little quiz that you should be able to answer. For newcomers, take it anyway! Learn a little something and if you are intrigued by any of the facts you discover, there are URLs for the posts they came from beside every answer.

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/27/quiz-time/feed/1Plan UVBhttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/26/plan-uvb/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/26/plan-uvb/#commentsThu, 26 Feb 2015 10:05:38 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9373[…]]]>You may have read last week that you should start wearing sunscreen at night. This was bad news for me: I’m already a hopeless victim of sunscreen marketing, slathering the stuff in rain or shine, in London fog, at dusk. I just can’t stop, despite mounting evidence that regular sunscreen may be less protective than advertised, and may even help cultivate a Vitamin D deficiency. And then, last week, Yale researchers found that UV rays keep wrecking skin cells up to three hours after the last photon has hit the skin. This implies that in addition to the SPF 45 I use during the day, I should stock my night table with an “ex post facto” overnight sunblock. With ingredients like vitamin E and antioxidants, this hypothetical cream would act like the Plan B of sun protection, undoing damage after it had ostensibly already been done.

While “night-time sunscreen” was an arresting image, though, that product (which is probably more like an aftersun) wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem: how do I get enough sun to be healthy without getting enough sun to give me cancer? What I really want is something that amps up my skin’s natural sun defenses 24-7 from the inside out. Many different ideas are knocking around various labs, and some might be on the market soon. The best ones manipulate melanin, so in addition to letting me ditch the goopy creams, they’d give me the Mediterranean glow I’ve always been so careful to avoid.

Unfortunately the story doesn’t end there. Doug Brash and his colleagues at Yale found that even several hours after the melanin-producing cells, called melanocytes, absorb the photons’ energy, they continue to produce molecules that damage the skin’s DNA. Call it melanin’s dark side.

By itself, an aftersun treatment that could mitigate this effect wouldn’t be enough. “UV irradiation is dangerous by multiple mechanisms,” says David Fisher, chair of dermatology at Massachussetts General Hospital. The mechanism Brash found, he says, is a new and significant addition to a long list, including the direct effects of UV light on DNA. Intriguingly, though, UV isn’t the only problem. Some kinds of melanin don’t need any help from the sun to be dangerous.

People with very fair skin are at higher risk for melanoma not simply because of the amount of melanin in their skin but because of the type. There are two kinds of melanin — pale-skinned redheads have pheomelanin; people with dark skin or hair have a dark brown or black variant known as eumelanin.

In the early 2000s Fisher was studying fair-skinned, “red-haired” mice to better understand the tanning process. He discovered that these mice’s melanin variant, pheomelanin, didn’t just inadequately protect against UV rays — something about the pigment itself encouraged their skin to develop melanoma.

This is down to something Fisher discovered about the general mechanism of the tanning process. UV rays don’t directly trigger the production of melanin. Instead, it’s a chain of events that starts with the photon hitting the skin and ends with a change in the melanocytes. In redheads that chain is faulty, which explains their greater cancer risk. Might it be possible to tweak this pathway? Instead of triggering the tanning process with a photon, could you use a topical drug to convince the skin to kick-start its own melanin production? Then there would be no stray energy for the melanocytes to pass on to other parts of the skin. You’d have a healthy tan that mimicked naturally high melanin levels and thereby lowered the risk of skin cancer.

Fisher devised a lotion that did exactly that — it tanned the pale mice and drastically cut their skin cancer risk. This was no Jersey Shore paint job; his drug worked at the cellular level, from the inside out to make the skin natively more resistant to sun damage.

Of course, the course of true love and science never did run smooth — they’re still working out how to apply their successes on mouse skin to much thicker human skin. “We have finally found several compounds which do [topical skin darkening] in normal human skin,” Fisher told me. He and his colleagues have been testing the drug on discarded human skin.

Fisher isn’t the only one working on sunless tanning: Scenesse, an Australian drug under review by the US Food and Drug Administration, works on the same general principle to boost melanin production for a protective tan. King’s College London researchers are studying natural sunscreen compounds used by coral-dwelling algae to protect themselves against the harsh all-day sun that shines through clear water. There’s even a pill packed with anti-oxidants to undo some of the sun’s energetic damage (though it won’t confer that glowy tan).

Until these hit the market, if you’re like me and worry endlessly about balancing your Vitamin D with your UV exposure, you can check the UV forecast. Or you could get one of these nifty little wristbands. I’ll probably keep applying sunscreen with irrational zeal. And don’t get me started on eye protection.

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/26/plan-uvb/feed/1Dreaming in the Pleistocenehttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/25/pleistocene-dreams/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/25/pleistocene-dreams/#commentsWed, 25 Feb 2015 09:00:05 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9375[…]]]>It would have been different if it hadn’t been a cave, if the excavation had been out in the daylight where mystery more easily washes out.

The darkness helped, nothing but my headlamp to show the way. Every morning we’d suit up at the cave entrance. A group of scientists descended a ladder one by one, packs filled with notebooks and tools. I had gotten onto the excavation by working at the base camp as a cook. They let me dig because they needed all the hands they could get. Bones were coming out of the cave by the thousands, a rich Pleistocene horizon. It was called Porcupine Cave, located in the dry, piney foothills of southern Colorado near South Park, 9,000 feet in elevation.

The ground inside was dusty, uneven, our lights probing rough rock passages. Woodrat urine streaked the walls, smelling like rotten molasses, a stench that went away after several hundred feet of creeping and boulder-hopping into cool, absolute darkness. In the bowels of this cave, an incalculable number of bones rested among each other, remains of cheetahs, sloths, sparrows, and bears. My job was an American camel. It was out on the edge of things under an uncomfortably low ceiling.

Other rooms had flood lights and sifting screens, diggers laughing and talking. The camel was alone. Nobody else wanted the assignment. They gave it to the cook.

The skull was the size of a football, an oddly-shaped lump of clay that took me weeks to dig out. I rested on my side and began scraping and brushing around the camel’s moist, collapsed eye socket. I crawled and twisted whenever the angle needed changing, causing my tools to slowly disperse over the course of the day. I may have left an artifact or two myself, the first evidence of human-megafauna interaction in this cave.

The camel was at least 300,000 years old, which put it before humans in North America. It had never known the likes of us, no spears, no fires with stick-figure animals standing around. I was a foreigner here and I knew it. Sometimes I would whisper to it as I reached into its eye socket, or grazed along its cheekbone, asking permission to take out another gram of soil.

The camel had picked a low place to die, the skull and its entire skeleton tucked back in corner of the cave, close enough to the original entrance a faint blue light would have bounced from to rock to rock. It must have entered injured, either fallen in, or was swiped by a 400-pound scimitar cat and made it this far to die. I let my mind drift in the long, tedious hours of excavation, sometimes turning off my headlamp and going by sound in complete darkness. I would rise up through the former entrance and step out of the cave, noticing that the ancient sunlight around me wasn’t much different. Brightened slightly by glaciers that crept over surrounding mountains, the sky seemed silver-blue.

Shielding my eyes in the clear light, I saw wheeling in the sky Pleistocene condors, bone-cleaning carrion hunters with dark, 12-foot wingspans fit for all the meat that would have been available, a protein revolution. Shaggy shapes roamed the valleys, tusk and saber-tooth gathered in herds, packs, scattered off alone. And no matter how far I looked, I saw no people.

You might think it would feel lonely, not another person on the entire land, but I felt liberated. The air tasted bright and I wanted to walk, to move. As if a magnet were pulling equally from all directions, I felt drawn to everything, valleys leading away to who knows where. I relished sounds of mastodons fisting up grass in their trunks, and the howling of big-skulled dire wolves far away.

Of course, all I could actually hear was the scratch scratch of my dental pick, and the hush of my artist’s brush flicking away crumbs of dirt. I suppose I could hear the dark silence, too, surrounding me as if I were at the bottom of a sea. Immersed in ancient bones and blackness, I inhabited two worlds at once, one wholly occupied continent streaming with lights and highways, humans long-settled on this side of the world, the other the black bottom of a cave where a camel died on a continent that had never — not yet — known our kind.

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/25/pleistocene-dreams/feed/1Bad Science Poethttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/24/bad-science-poet-3/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/24/bad-science-poet-3/#commentsTue, 24 Feb 2015 09:00:20 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9367[…]]]>Time for a further sampling from the journals of Bad Science Poet. Remember: “It’s not the science that’s bad—it’s the poetry!”™

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/24/bad-science-poet-3/feed/1Flabbergasted By the Real Worldhttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/23/9362/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/23/9362/#commentsMon, 23 Feb 2015 09:00:24 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9362[…]]]>I grew up on a small farm and among other creatures, we raised chickens. Every day they had to be fed and watered and their eggs, warm from their bodies, had to be gathered. When the chickens got old enough to stop laying regularly, we’d turn them into stew: we’d kill them and dress them, “dress” meaning take off their feathers and feet, and take out their innards. As a kid, all the blood and guts didn’t bother me, I had an operating knowledge of chicken anatomy, I’d seen it all before.

In fact I was pretty cynical in general, especially about things the grownups said, which I thought were mostly theory or flat-out propaganda. Except for one memory that can’t be entirely right but I’m sticking to it because it was something our mom showed us and for once, it was interesting; in fact, it was a miracle.

I’d said that the chickens we were dressing were old stewpots, past laying. But one day inside one of them was an unlaid egg – no shell, just a yolk and white held inside a leathery membrane. I remember it sitting at the far end of a tube that ended in the place in the chicken where the egg came out. Our mom said something like, “Look at this. You don’t see this often.” And she slowly pushed the egg all the way into the tube and then carefully and gently – our mom had good hands – squeezed the tube so that the egg moved slowly down it. And when the egg reached the end of the tube and she pushed it out, well by God, it had a shell on it. It was a hard shell, a regular eggshell. Inside that ordinary anatomical looking tube, sort of pinky-tan and tough, some miracle happened.

I remembered this because I ran across the picture at the top of this page, an egg whose shell had been dissolved by vinegar. I thought it looked like I remember the pre-tube egg looking. So I did the responsible-journalist thing and googled and indeed, eggshells are calcium carbonate which indeed dissolved in vinegar, so the memory of the pre-tube egg was right. But what about the tube? Google Images was more than helpful and I’m not going to link to it becauseI find I’m no longer so blasé about chicken anatomy. The egg does move through a tube in which a yolk first collects a white around it, and then both are surrounded by a membrane. And when the egg reaches one part of the tube, called the shell gland, the calcium carbonate shell is added. Every .gov or .edu site I read said the egg stays in the shell gland for around 20 hours, which seems about enough time to account for a daily miracle.

But #1: Our mom didn’t take 20 hours to push that egg through the tube and give a hard shell. So maybe I’m remembering something wrongly – maybe my memory of the leathery egg was wrong and maybe the egg was not at the beginning of the tube but had been sitting in the shell gland for 19.9 hours already.

I don’t care. This memory of membrane transforming into shell, of pure magic, was of one of the first times I was flabbergasted by the real world — surely the best feeling possible, the opposite of cynicism, the foundation for humility and joy. So I’m going to keep remembering it regardless. Anyway #2: not one of those .gov or .edu sites explained the miracle.
___________

Helen: “Why, 18 degrees isn’t bad, I thought to myself. All you need is…I did some math in my head and realized I was wearing about $350 worth of specialized clothing, while occasionally passing some poor soul hunched down in a hooded sweatshirt.”

Cameron reduxed, updated: “I must confess now that, three years later, all the seed catalogs that arrived this winter have gone straight to the recycling bin. Last year I tried to grow Michael Pollan and several other tomato varieties from seed; only one of the 50 or so seedlings that emerged resulted in actual tomatoes. When it’s tomato season, I’m going to the farmers’ market instead. But I did just get these apple trees . . .”

Guest Judith Lewis Mernit: “Poor Isis! She died in such beloved company, but lived without much purpose. That’s the final anachronism: Among England’s aristocrats between the wars, a lazy Lab kept for show by the fireside would have been odd indeed. The fantasy dog named Isis may have enjoyed a long and comfortable life, but for a dog presumably bred to fetch ducks from icy rivers, it couldn’t have been much fun.”

Sally: “The French language – and thus how the French think and speak, their worldview – is controlled by the state. English is a free-for-all. Is there a middle ground? I don’t want to get all Hitler about it, but it wouldn’t kill us to have a bit of border security.”

Guest Stephanie Paige Ogburn: “The mailman hustles down the stairs. The watcher makes his move. A quick flip of the clip, and he’s in. The mail slot’s inner door creaks closed behind him, swinging back and forth. He lands on the small table that catches the mail, sits for a minute atop the Christmas cards and grocery store ads, then looks around, stealthily.”

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/21/the-last-word-141/feed/0A Visit From the Christmas Squirrelhttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/20/a-visit-from-the-christmas-squirrel/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/20/a-visit-from-the-christmas-squirrel/#commentsFri, 20 Feb 2015 09:00:02 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9337[…]]]>He must have come in through the mail slot. I imagine him watching the mailman stride up the front steps Christmas Eve, flipping open the metal flap and thrusting the envelopes inside. The flap is propped open a smidge by the metal binder clip we use to hold outgoing mail. It is snowing — cold. To him,* this unknown land inside the mail slot must have seemed warm, inviting, perhaps full of food.

The mailman hustles down the stairs. The watcher makes his move. A quick flip of the clip, and he’s in. The mail slot’s inner door creaks closed behind him, swinging back and forth. He lands on the small table that catches the mail, sits for a minute atop the Christmas cards and grocery store ads, then looks around, stealthily.

The house is quiet. My partner Ryan and I left yesterday for Las Vegas. We turned down the heat, took out the trash, recycling, and compost. There’s not much to find.

But wait — the intruder’s eyes catch a flash of orange atop a bookshelf. Score! It’s a passel of decorative gourds, nobbled and bumpy, with rich pumpkin-like seeds inside.He scampers over, glances around once more — still nothing moves — and starts nibbling.

This is the scene we return to after four days away and a 10-hour drive home. Seeds everywhere, gourds disemboweled, a few chewed-up bus passes in the mix for good measure. And poop. Tiny brown BBs everywhere, on the coffee table, on the rug, on the floor, in the kitchen.

It has to be a squirrel, Ryan and I decide. We have a history with squirrels. They ate my corn hole beanbags when I left them outside. They sneak into our compost. They decimated our jack-o-lanterns.

We hunt for him, throwing open closet doors and peering into trash bins, but he’s nowhere to be found. The bits of gourd look dry; we decide he’s come and gone, exiting the way he entered. After a few minutes online, we convince ourselves we won’t catch hantavirus and wearily clean up bits of gourd, sanitize surfaces and collapse into bed.

Sunday is laundry day. Ryan heads downstairs to our tiny basement/laundry space, and finds himself face to face with the Eastern Fox Squirrel that invaded our home. I think they both panic, a little bit. But most troubled is the squirrel, who retreats into the crawl space above the washing machine.

We ponder what to do. We try opening the door from the laundry to outside, sprinkling a trail of crumbled Saltines up the steps and into the snow outside, a la Hansel and Gretel. (In retrospect, I don’t know why I thought that a cracker sick people prize for its bland tastelessness, would somehow entice a squirrel.)

I turn to Facebook. Friends make suggestions; seeds, nuts; peanut butter. Why didn’t I think of that? Anyone who watches Disney movies knows squirrels love nuts! I attribute my momentary inability to think like a hungry squirrel to post-holiday exhaustion, and lay out a trail of pumpkin seeds and pecans.

Then Ryan and I start to worry the food leading out the open door could become a two-way street, attracting more squirrels to come in. Plan scratched. Ryan bikes down the street to the hardware store and picks up a $30 live squirrel trap.

“It looks small,” I say.

“I thought so too, but the guy at the hardware store said to remember, squirrels are mostly fur,” he answers.

“Good point,” I say.

We bait it with peanut butter (crunchy, natch), and stick it on the floor in the laundry room. There’s so much tension, so many unanswered questions.

Like:

How long does it take for a scared squirrel to chill out enough to explore the inside of a trap and take a lick of peanut butter big enough to trigger the door’s closure?

Should we leave the house so the squirrel feels peaceful and unencumbered by our upstairs noise, which to him must seem like the stomping of giants?

If we go downstairs to check on the squirrel trap and he’s not in it, does our presence reset the squirrel’s inner clock of boldness, meaning he will take even longer to explore his way into our trap?

When Ryan goes down to check a few hours later, he sees the squirrel just outside the trap — so close! The squirrel sees him, too. Oops.

While we wait for the trap to work, I wonder other things. If the squirrel’s been in our house for three days, what’s been happening in his house? Have other squirrels been stealing his food? Will he even have a home when he is returned to the wild? The Internet has no answers.

Later that evening, we check again. This time, the squirrel’s in the trap. He’s clearly terrified; the smell of scared animal fills the room. Ryan covers the trap with a towel to calm him down; I inch close to take a look. Even though we see squirrels outside every day, there’s something different about having one up close in my home. I want to say hi, and let him know that we’re cool, even though he ate my gourds.(And possibly my cornhole bags, compost, and jack-o-lantern.)

But he’s so frightened. He rockets around tiny cage. It shakes and rattles. It’s clear that the kindest thing to do is just take him outside and let him go.

So that’s what we do. My partner sets the cage down in the snow. He opens the door. The squirrel pauses for a microsecond, just long enough for me to wonder if he’s developed some sort of rodent Stockholm syndrome.

Then, a quick rattle of the cage, and he’s gone.

*Although I refer to it as a “he” I really have no idea what gender the squirrel is.

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/20/a-visit-from-the-christmas-squirrel/feed/1Do you speak English?http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/19/do-you-speak-english/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/19/do-you-speak-english/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 09:00:41 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9356[…]]]>“The problem with France is that there’s no French word for entrepreneur.”

It’s tragic that George W. Bush didn’t actually say this, because it perfectly illuminates the stealth with which languages insinuate themselves into each other. If you speak English, you probably know that when you say sans and en vogue you’re using import words. But you might also think you’re speaking English when you refer to a blonde or a brunette.

Recently there’s been a lot of interest in untranslatable loaner words. These get passed around the internet as linguistic amuse bouches. But it might not be long before you’re throwing iktsuarpok around in your daily bants. The permeability of the English language is part of what has ensured its higgledy-piggledy rise to global dominance. This feat of linguistic and cultural assimilation becomes even more impressive when you consider that it couldn’t be repeated even when exactingly planned — and when you consider how strenuously other cultures have resisted the same fate.

French is just one of many stowaways in the English language. Lothario’s Italian origins are obvious, but did you know about dildos? Zero is Arabic in origin. Even patio, that most beige of suburban vocabulary, traces its roots to Spain, alongside cafeteria and barbecue. Lately it’s German imports that are ascendant, maybe because they’re über-zeitgeisty. Angst — that speedball of emotions, equal parts depression and anxiety — is no mere erzatz neurosis (ennui might suffice but it’s hardly a doppelgänger). You’d be forgiven for wondering whether English has any English words in it at all.

But as these words cross linguistic borders, they do more than just expand our catalogue of utilitarian descriptors. They smuggle with them something else from their native culture, a kind of Germanness, or Italianness, or Frenchness that’s hard to define. You know, like a je ne sais quoi.

Hitler sought to undo that. In a hamfisted way he understood that language is the primary vector by which cultures infiltrate one another. So in an effort to close the barn doors, the Nazis instituted “Nazi Deutsch“, an ultra pure language that replaced any words and concepts of insufficiently German pedigree with brutally literal compound words. It wasn’t just Yiddish words that were scoured. Photo became Lichtbild (light picture), telephone became Fernsprecher (farspeaker). French foods were Germanized. Eau de Cologne became Koelnisch Wasser. Even physicists could no longer speak of hertz because Heinrich Hertz was Jewish.

Well, never mind. After the second world war, German has become one of the most anglicized languages in the world. Technology especially has ensured that a large percentage of German is English, but it doesn’t always make sense — I remain puzzled as to why the word for mobile phone is “handy”.

Neither is protecting the home language reserved for genocidal maniacs. The Académie française — created in the 1600s to scrub the Italian influence out of French — is now chiefly concerned with protecting the purity of the language from “Franglaisfication” — Le Big Mac notwithstanding. The US hasn’t been immune either; during the second world war, sauerkraut briefly endured the name “liberty cabbage”, and the “freedom fries” incident is still embarrassingly fresh.

In a terrific 2013 Guardian piece, Andrew Gallix described the furor that erupted when French universities considered teaching some courses in English to attract more international students from the likes of China and India. In these countries English is the de facto second language. Why? The porousness of English linguistic borders partly accounts for it. It’s not simply down to the simplicity of the syntax (our nouns for example are ungendered). It’s the license to assimilate complex emotional concepts from other languages.

That has consequences beyond a ballooning dictionary. Words aren’t just utilitarian conveyances of abstract concepts. They come loaded with all kinds of stowaways: what better synecdoche than “schadenfreude” for the certain pettiness that permeates the German character? (I’m German so I can say that – with love of course, fellow Germans! stand down.) And how else to explain “bof“?

A little less animated in the hands, and this would be the perfect “bof”.

This emotional “payload” is probably the number one thing that was missing from Esperanto, a language created out of whole cloth in 1887 with ambitions of becoming the world’s international language. As you can imagine, Esperantists ran afoul of Hitler’s language Nazification program — many were executed — but the Nazis needn’t have worried. Esperanto had ideas above its station. That’s precisely because it was designed to carry no payload, emotional, cultural or otherwise.

Not that it wasn’t a really nice idea. Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof created Esperanto because he believed cultural stowaways in language were to blame for the conflict in the world. Esperanto would be a coolly neutral global language. But that bloodlessness was its undoing. (It has since downgraded its ambitions to being “the auxiliary language”, and if that means “academic curiosity many people are vaguely familiar with”, they have succeeded!) Meanwhile, English continues on its path to being an organic version of Esperanto, packed with all the best cuts of vocabulary from around the globe.

To sum up the significance of the French language melee, Andrew Gallix turned to Roland Barthes, the French linguist and philosopher who indicted language itself as fascist: “not because it censors but on the contrary, because it forces us to think and say certain things… We are spoken by language as much as we speak through it.” The French language – and thus how the French think and speak, their worldview – is controlled by the state. English is a free-for-all. Is there a middle ground? I don’t want to get all Hitler about it, but it wouldn’t kill us to have a bit of border security. Because bukkake. [at reader request, edited to add that while there are no images in the urban dictionary definition, it’s still strongly NSFW]

WARNING: If you are not up-to-date on the most recently aired episode of Downton Abbey on PBS, and you actually care what happens, read no more. Spoiler, though hardly a shock, within.

“I’m worried about Isis,” Downton Abbey’s Lord Grantham told his daughter Mary the other night. “She’s not looking too clever.” ‘Tis true: Isis, the yellow Labrador Retriever whose ample rear end has long graced the opening credits of the show, is about to die. It’s nothing to do with the recent and awkward association of her name with Islamic terrorism, though: Isis has lived at least eight years since she appeared as an adult dog in Season Two. She has lived through the Great War, the Spanish flu, and Matthew Crawley’s histrionic car crash; she has lasted longer than some of the series’ devoted viewers. Isis has simply grown old.

Not that we aren’t sad to see her go. When Lord Grantham carried Isis into the bedroom wrapped in a blanket and settled her down on the bed next to his wife—the dog’s impending death mending the rift that had yawned between the couple for the last few episodes—I actually cried. But not much, really, and not for long. Because not only has Isis done quite well by the standard of yellow Labrador movie stars, expiring with less cloying indignity than Marley and less violence than rabid Old Yeller (actually a yellow Lab/Mastiff cross), Isis is also a perversely modern dog, and one that I never considered quite real.

This past weekend, I hung out at the San Diego Labrador Retriever Club’s annual breed show in Valley Center, California, where Labrador dogs like Isis competed for top honors in contests based mostly on looks. Under the broad shade of oak trees on an 80-degree weekend, roughly every third dog was an Isis: Sweet-faced, of yellow coat, a little bit daft, and, frankly, quite chubby. Later, over lunch with six hardened Labrador fanciers, five of them women, I asked who’d seen Downton Abbey. “I love that show!” said one woman, a breeder from Kalispell, Montana. But would the Crawleys have had a dog like Isis? “No, probably not,” she said. Isis was too stocky—and the wrong color. “If there were any yellow labs,” she added, “they’d be that color,” pointing to the butterscotch flowers on the shirt worn by the lone man at the table. “Or even red.”

By most accounts, the Labrador retriever has its origins in the St. John’s Dog, a working water dog once common in Newfoundland. A full century before Downton, the hypergraphic waterfowl hunter Colonel Peter Hawker wrote in his diary that he’d possessed one, named him Tiger, and loved him like mad. On the unfortunate day that the dog succumbed to a “violent distemper” and had to be shot, he described him: “quite black, and with a long head, very fine action,” possessed of “good temper, high courage,” and “excellence in shooting for the fields.” In the dog’s honor, he paraphrased Hamlet: “We shall not look upon his like again.”

Perhaps not, but plenty of breeders have tried to create his like again, and some have probably come close. In 1815, when the second Earl of Malmesbury needed a good bird dog for his ornithology pursuits, he imported a few St. John’s dogs from Newfoundland and began breeding his own line—selecting, no doubt, for fine heads and high courage. At the same time, the fifth Duke of Buccleuch was importing “Little Newfoundlands” to aid in hunts on his Scottish estate. By the 1880s, Malmesbury’s heirs had lost interest in hunting, and Buccleuch’s dogs had all died off, so the third Earl of Malmesbury gave the sixth Duke of Buccleuch six carefully bred “Labrador” dogs—Malmesbury’s term—to begin the family’s kennel anew. According to the late trainer and historian Richard Wolters, those six black dogs are the ancestors of all modern Labs.

Pictures of Buccleuch’s early Labs show lean, game dogs whose short coats repelled not only water but ice. Virtually all of them were black. Until 1899, when Major C. Radclyffe registered his yellow Ben of Hyde with the U.K. kennel club, light-colored coats were deemed a fault and breeders culled puppies born with them. And Radclyffe’s “yellow” meant almost dark gold.

Isis’s creamy coat and cultivated physique diverges from those ancient lines. But she departs somewhat from the modern breed standard, too, in ways that cast harsh light on beauty-contest dog shows. The world of purebred dogs is rife with examples of dogs whose care and breeding values the opinions of show-ring judges over function in the field, the obedience ring, or even just a backyard game of fetch. At the Westminster Dog Show this week in Madison Square Garden, pugs trotted around the ring with snouts are so squished they can hardly breathe. Bulldog bitches notoriously gestate puppies with heads too big to whelp without surgical intervention. I’ve known some breed-champion terriers that lack the drive to tree a squirrel, much less go-to-ground after a rat; some prize-winning retrievers, one of my tablemates told me, just plain won’t retrieve.

So it is with Labs: Sometime in the last couple of decades, the Labs in the show ring got fat. The Kalispell breeder’s friend, a woman whose chocolate Lab grew up too small to compete in the show ring, resented it. She’d read an article in Gun Dog magazine that described early Labs so light and compact they could ride in the bow of the boat. “These dogs here today would tip a boat over!” she said. Everyone laughed.

How this happened, and why, no one seems to know. The best answer I got at the Lab show was “judges like fat Labs.” But nobody else seems to—not my lunch companions, not the Midwestern duck hunters who prize their agile water dogs, not even the keepers of the breeding books. The Labrador Retriever Club, Inc., better guardians of the breed standard, apparently, than any kennel club in any country, wrote a stern letter to the American Kennel Club last April, imploring judges to remember that the Labrador retriever should possess an “athletic, well-balanced conformation that enables it to function as a retrieving gun dog.”

Or to guide the blind, calm traumatized veterans throughout their jittery days, wow crowds in dock-diving contests, retrieve felled ducks from lakes for their hunters, and search in the rubble for both the living and dead. There’s the other rub with Isis: As far as I can tell, the darn dog never even got to hunt. Downton’s wranglers brought in fox hounds, harriers, springer spaniels and black Labs for that. If Isis wasn’t looking too clever on her death bed, maybe it’s because she never got much of a chance to look clever at all.

Poor Isis! She died in such beloved company, but lived without much purpose. That’s the final anachronism: Among England’s aristocrats between the wars, a lazy Lab kept for show by the fireside would have been odd indeed. The fantasy dog named Isis may have enjoyed a long and comfortable life, but for a dog presumably bred to fetch ducks from icy rivers, it couldn’t have been much fun.

Top photo: Isis, on her way out. Courtesy PBS. Bottom photo: Prince Albert and his wife Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon with their “yellow” Lab in the 1920s. Wikimedia Commons.

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/18/guest-post-isis-a-dog-out-of-time/feed/0Redux: The Scientist in the Gardenhttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/17/redux-the-scientist-in-the-garden/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/17/redux-the-scientist-in-the-garden/#commentsTue, 17 Feb 2015 09:00:05 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9345[…]]]>This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared in January 2012.

I can’t remember why the seed catalogs started showing up, but once they did, I was a goner. If you haven’t ever gotten one, imagine full color photo spreads of produce, like the striped Tigger Melon and and the orange-red lusciousness of the French pumpkin Rouge Vif d’Etampes. I suppose the names don’t have quite the ring of “Miss September,” but compared to some centerfold beauty, these fruits and vegetables are much more alluring — maybe because some September, a new variety might appear in my own garden, one that I could give any name I wanted.

This is how I ended up with at least six different varieties of tomato seeds last year. I’m not quite sure what it is about tomatoes. Even before I had a real garden, I’d buy the plants every year. They always seemed so hopeful, appearing in the nursery in winter, when you can’t even imagine that by fall you’ll be saying ridiculous things like, “Caprese salad, again? I don’t think I can do it.”

Somewhere along the lines, I realized there were more options out there then the plants we could find at our local nursery. I knew I had to grow from seed once I learned that there was a variety named after the writer Michael Pollan. I could even figure out how to crossbreed my own tomatoes (and wondered what I’d call a Black & Brown Boar crossed with a Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye–oh, the possibilities!).

So there I found myself, one morning last winter, in front of a tray of dirt with seeds and Sharpies and labels in hand.

As I planted, I got to thinking about Gregor Mendel and his pea experiments. I’d first learned about them in high school, when the charts showing tall and dwarf pea plants, yellow and green peas, made it all seem so easy. But with seeds in hand, I started to buckle under the logistics. To do anything, first these seeds would have to grow.

Even if they did, I’d then have to do some tricky tweezer work (I read a bit about crossing tomatoes here). Then the tomatoes would have to grow, produce seeds. I’d have to save the seeds, grow the first generation the next winter, and do it all over again. If I was lucky, I’d start seeing crazy new phenotypes two summers from now.

That’s what Brad Gates does. At Wild Boar Farms (the California farm where I bought many of my seeds), he grows and tends thousands of plants each year, always keeping an eye out for novel tomatoes. (Brad’s Black Heart was a result of a random mutation that he spotted).

Gates used to ship some of his seeds off to the Southern Hemisphere, so he could grow two generations of tomatoes and try to speed through the breeding process. But he was never sure what was happening with his tomatoes, if someone was choosing exactly what he would.

Even though I’ll never know exactly what Mendel was thinking every day, when he went out to tend his peas (although Robin Marantz Henig’s A Monk and Two Peas gave me a good idea), but I did ask Gates. When it comes to growing tomatoes, he said,“the fun part is all the Christmas presents I get to open every year,” he said, Whether it’s new flavors, textures, shapes, and sizes—“there are hundreds of surprises.”

And as my tomatoes began to grow, I started to get it. Every day, I watched my little plants unfold. Maybe it’s crazy that I had to set up hundreds of seeds to finally take the time to watch something grow. My curiosity about my future tomatoes grew each day—but at the same time, so did my patience.

What happened next shouldn’t really have surprised someone who once required a hazmat team to descend on her freshman chemistry lab (mercury spill from carelessly placed thermometer). When I set the starts out for hardening, a spring windstorm set all the labels flying. Then friends started to pick up some of my extra seedlings (I couldn’t fit all 144 in our raised beds). By the time I planted, I had a vague idea of which one was which, but then old tomatillos grew up among them and everything became a tangled mass of vine. Even the seeds I tried to save once the season was done got thrown out by accident.

Winter is here again, and so are my seed catalogs. I don’t think I will discover anything that hasn’t already been grown, and it’s unlikely that I will create a variety that will someday lure gardeners from between the pages of a seed catalog. But I do have a new respect for genetics, and for farmers. And I’ve certainly learned one thing already: Michael Pollan is delicious.

I must confess now that, three years later, all the seed catalogs that arrived this winter have gone straight to the recycling bin. Last year I tried to grow Michael Pollan and several other tomato varieties from seed; only one of the 50 or so seedlings that emerged resulted in actual tomatoes. When it’s tomato season, I’m going to the farmers’ market instead. But I did just get these apple trees . . .

The other morning when I left for work, it was 12 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

How you feel about that statement probably depends on where you live. Well, first, if you live outside the U.S., you might be wondering what that means, so I’ll tell you: it’s -11 Celsius. You’re impressed now, right?

If, like my relatives in Michigan, you are under several feet of snow, you might think, “pshaw, 12 is tropical.” (It was -5 F/-21 C in their town the last time I checked, Sunday at 11 pm.)

But if you live somewhere warmer, you might think something between “brrr” and “holy cow, people can live in that?”

Yeah, we can live in that. We are tough, we humans. For one thing, we have buildings and thermostats. Also, our bodies have ways to deal with cold. They cut back on blood flow to the periphery, keeping the temperature up in the core. If things get interesting they can put the muscles to work at generating heat by shivering.

I walked to work through that 12 degree air and, while I wouldn’t say I enjoyed every step into the wind, I didn’t hate it. In the 30 minutes between home and office my nose got chilly as did, oddly, my left elbow, and my eyelashes froze, but I arrived with all my parts.

I mean, I went to college in Minnesota. I know what cold is. It was -37 F (-38 C) one morning my freshman year. I grew up with outdoorsy parents, and I know how to dress. That’s the main thing that makes it possible for me to enjoy this weather: textile technology. In college, it was a massive, down-filled Eddie Bauer coat. A couple of years ago, for long days of reporting in the High Arctic, it was a snowmobile suit and about 20 other articles of clothing (long underwear, wool sweater, mittens, more mittens, socks, more socks). This winter the most valuable garment has been a strangely warm, fuzzy green hooded fleece from the REI clearance rack.

One weekend in January I set out on foot for a brunch, five miles away, at 18 F (-8 C). Long walks are one of my great urban joys, but it soon started to seem like a terrible idea. I imagined a frostbitten nose, or having to admit defeat and catch a bus. But within a few minutes I was moving south, sun in my face, wind at my back.

Why, 18 degrees isn’t bad, I thought to myself. All you need is…I did some math in my head and realized I was wearing about $350 worth of specialized clothing, while occasionally passing some poor soul hunched down in a hooded sweatshirt.

So yeah. 12 degrees is warmer than a lot of other temperatures. But, if you’re a human…it’s still pretty cold.

Parents considering whether to immunize their children face the Prisoner’s Dilemma, says Erik, and decision theory can help explain the appalling presence of measles in a nation that enjoys modern medicine.

Cassie tours a biosafety level 3 laboratory and explores the risks and benefits of engineering (for study) extra-virulent strains of the diseases that threaten us.

Does the Earth belong to us – to be used wisely and protected as a resource – or should that protection acknowledge that our species is a destructive parasite? Michelle finds support for both views in the annals of conservation science.

A mysterious disappearance in Northern Canada has locals prowling the woods for signs of a pink hat.

Somewhere within walking distance of me, there is a dead human body, unburied, in the woods, and it will likely never be found.

Psychiatrist Atsumi Yoshikubo arrived in Yellowknife from Uto, Japan last October 17, one of hundreds of tourists who come to see the Northern Lights every year. She checked into our nicest hotel for one week and inquired about aurora borealis tours, only to be told that the tourist season was over for the year.

Security cameras show the 45-year-old buying souvenirs at a local gift shop – presents that remained in her luggage, presumably in anticipation of a return home, when her room was searched after she missed both checkout and flight home. She was last seen walking along the highway toward the power station.

I have never seen this city so mobilized as it was during the week after the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) released the missing persons alert. Something about a 100-pound lady in a pink coat and hat having been swallowed by the Northern landscape was enough to rouse even the most self-interested residents’ protective instincts.

Yellowknife’s population of 20,000 is contained in 100 square kilometers, outside of which is an unsettled aboriginal land claim. This has the happy effect of total wilderness within easy view of a small clump of 11-storey buildings. So it is quite possible to go on a walk from the center of town and find yourself out of your depth in a dangerously isolated situation. The temperature was in the negative teens (Celcius) – mild for the season but enough to produce hypothermia with enough exposure.

My strongest fear was foul play. About once every summer a woman is assaulted by a stranger on one of the local walking paths, and we would have been so ashamed if a visitor traveling alone had been victimized in this way.

The search-and-rescue effort started at the last point Yoshikubo had been seen and expanded when no signs were found. Local residents volunteered for the search party, but they also made it their weekend activity, taking the initiative to drive out and wander about in the area with friends, looking for clues.

As soon as you walk any distance at all in that spruce forest you realize the vanishingly slim likelihood of finding anyone at random. Less so if there has been a new snowfall to mask any prints. Even an organized grid of searchers has to be aligned in an impractically compact pattern to avoid passing over an unconscious person. Heat-sensing aerial searches failed to turn up anything either.

Then, a week later, just as suddenly as they had announced the crisis, the RCMP called off the search. Evidence had surfaced that Yoshikubo had “planned to become a missing person”. For reasons best known to herself, she had arrived here intending to disappear into the wilderness, and she had succeeded.

Many suicides in Japan occur in the Aokigahara Forest at the base of Mount Fuji. Perhaps the legendary beauty of the Northern Lights struck her as a poetic surrounding for her last view of the heavens. I found myself wishing for her sake that the weather hadn’t been so grotty and unbeautiful at her arrival. I can’t imagine it met her expectations.

As for the trinkets found in her bag, psychiatrists noted that suicides of this type are sometimes a way of testing fate: “If I am rescued, so be it; but if I am not, then it’s just meant to be.” If that was the case, then I’m very sorry we weren’t able to save her – either through a physical rescue or a psychological one.

Image: Atsumi Yoshikubo in the Gallery of the Midnight Sun

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/13/lost-in-the-woods/feed/0Aldo Explains it Allhttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/12/aldo-explains-it-all/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/12/aldo-explains-it-all/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 09:00:23 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9291[…]]]>You may have heard that conservation biologists are arguing with each other. Some say nature should be protected for humans; others say it should be protected from humans; others say it’s possible to do both. This may sound like an academic debate—and in many ways it is—but it has become a very nasty one, and over the past couple of years it has severely taxed an important field that has far too few resources to begin with.

I’ve written about the argument’s gory details elsewhere, but here I’d like to take a longer view. For this fight was, in its broadest sense, settled more than a half-century ago, and the referee is still relevant. His name was Aldo Leopold.

Leopold—considered the father of both the American wilderness system and the science of wildlife management—is an icon in conservation circles. He was a talented and prolific writer, and he did much of his thinking in public, which means that today you can find a Leopold quote for just about any shade of green. He was educated as a utilitarian conservationist—one who protects nature for humans—but he understood the need to protect nature from humans, too. In Leopold’s time, as today, this philosophical divide was fuzzy but fierce, and he spent much of his career trying to resolve it. In his final collection of essays, A Sand County Almanac, he did.

When Leopold finished the collection, shortly before his death in 1948, he had long argued that wilderness was vitally important to protect both for and from humans. He had argued that humans could find both aesthetic beauty and practical use in what he called “land health.” And he had called for people to exercise “voluntary decency” toward the rest of nature—to accept “obligations over and above self-interest” to nature just as they accepted similar obligations to their families and communities. In the foreword to A Sand County Almanac, he brings these ideas together in one of his most famous passages:

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

In 1985, nearly forty years after Leopold wrote these words, the biologist Michael Soulé founded the “crisis discipline” of conservation biology. One of its principles, he wrote, was that “biotic diversity has intrinsic value, irrespective of its instrumental or utilitarian value.” In 2012, in the paper that kicked off the current kerfuffle within the field, Nature Conservancy scientist Peter Kareiva and environmental studies professor Michelle Marvier wrote that “nature also merits conservation for very practical and more self-centered reasons concerning what nature and healthy ecosystems provide to humanity.” Both of these ideas are embedded in Leopold’s passage.

Despite the enormous and often destructive impact of humans on nature, Leopold argued, we aren’t in charge of nature and shouldn’t aspire to be. Neither should we air-breathing, water-drinking humans try to stand apart from it. (Leopold would have probably disliked both the extravagant utilitarianism of Stewart Brand—who opened his 1968 Whole Earth Catalog by proclaiming that “We are as gods and might as well get good at it” —and the misanthropic extremes of the environmental movement.) The proper role for humanity in nature, Leopold wrote, was neither conqueror nor exile but “plain member and citizen.” To paraphrase another of his famous lines: We can tinker, but we’d damn well better save all the parts.

Leopold came to believe that through this kind of humble citizenship, our need to use nature and our desire to preserve it could be reconciled. “Not easily, and not quickly,” his biographer Curt Meine writes. “But in the end Leopold was pragmatic enough to see that they had to be, and idealistic enough to believe that they could be.”

The world has changed dramatically since Leopold’s time, and our conservation problems are more wicked than ever. Conservationists have plenty to argue about. But when it comes to the big question—why protect nature?—Aldo Leopold has already provided a very good answer.

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/12/aldo-explains-it-all/feed/1Behind the Steel Doorhttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/11/behind-the-steel-door/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/11/behind-the-steel-door/#commentsWed, 11 Feb 2015 09:00:49 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9327[…]]]>In 2011, Yoshihiro Kawaoka reported that his team had engineered a pandemic form of the bird flu virus. Bird flu, also known as H5N1, has infected infected nearly 700 people worldwide and killed more than 400. But it hasn’t yet gained the ability to jump easily from human to human. Kawaoka’s research suggested that capability might be closer than anyone had imagined. His team showed that their virus could successfully hop from ferret to ferret via airborne droplets. In addition to scaring the bejesus out of many, Kawaoka’s controversial study, and a similar study by Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands, also sparked a debate about the wisdom of engineering novel and potentially deadly pathogens in the lab.

It’s easy to see why people would be skeptical of research that aims to make pathogens that are deadlier or more transmissible than those found in nature. Marc Lipsitch and Alison Galvani outline many of the criticisms in an editorial published last year. Such experiments “impose a risk of accidental and deliberate release that, if it led to extensive spread of the new agent, could cost many lives. While such a release is unlikely in a specific laboratory conducting research under strict biosafety procedures, even a low likelihood should be taken seriously, given the scale of destruction if such an unlikely event were to occur. Furthermore, the likelihood of risk is multiplied as the number of laboratories conducting such research increases around the globe.”

But Kawaoka makes a decent counterargument. “H5N1 viruses circulating in nature already pose a threat, because influenza viruses mutate constantly and can cause pandemics with great losses of life. Within the past century, ‘Spanish’ influenza, which stemmed from a virus of avian origin, killed between 20 million and 50 million people. Because H5N1 mutations that confer transmissibility in mammals may emerge in nature, I believe that it would be irresponsible not to study the underlying mechanisms,” he wrote in a 2012 editorial.

Last week I stood in the very space where Kawaoka’s ferrets fell ill, a small beige room accessible only by passing through an air lock. The air pressure is kept abnormally low in the containment facilities so that air can only flow from the outside in. Researchers typically don Tyvek suits and respirators before entering. But because the facility was shuttered for routine maintenance, I was allowed to walk through in my street clothes: No hood, no gloves, no booties. The lab had been thoroughly disinfected, but my scalp tingled with the knowledge of the viruses that had been thriving there.

Labs that work with microorganisms are classified according to biosafety levels. Microbes that don’t cause disease require few precautions. They can be safely studied in biosafety level 1 (BSL-1) laboratories. However, the most deadly and contagious pathogens, such as Ebola, must be studied in strictly regulated BSL-4 laboratories. The ferret room, part of the University of Wisconsin’s Influenza Research Institute (IRI), is what’s known as a BSL-3 Ag lab, which includes almost all of the features typically found in BSL-4 facilities. This is no slipshod operation. The air coming out the containment facility passes through multiple HEPA filters and the liquid waste gets cooked at 250 degrees for an hour, a process that makes the basement smell like warm shampoo. The effluent system alone cost a million dollars. The list of procedures for entering and exiting the facility is dizzyingly long: Before entering the lab, “the researchers are going to take all of their clothes off, including undergarments, and put on scrubs and dedicated shoes. They’re going to wear booties inside of those shoes and booties on the outside. They’re going to take a couple of towels and an extra pair of scrubs and then they’ll go into the secure corridor,” says Rebecca Moritz, select agent program manager in the Office of Biological Safety. Then they move on to another room where they put on their protective gear and enter the air lock. When they leave, they must strip down, ditch their Tyvek according to a strict disrobing protocol, and hit the showers. “Flu isn’t hardy. Soap and water is going to kill it,” Moritz says. And if the soap doesn’t kill it, the giant cooker in the basement certainly will.

Of course, no system is foolproof. Accidents do happen. I wrote about some of them in 2007: That year the UK announced that an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease had almost certainly been the result of a virus that escaped from a nearby lab. In 2006, a researcher at Texas A&M University came down with brucellosis after disinfecting a chamber used to expose mice to the bacteria. In 2004, two researchers at Beijing’s National Institute of Virology contracted severe acute respiratory syndrome, infecting seven other people and killing one. And later that year, a Russian scientist died after accidentally injecting herself with the Ebola virus.

So the real question is this: Do the benefits of this kind of risky research outweigh the risks? The answer isn’t yet clear. In October 2014, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Department of Health and Human Services announced that they would stop funding studies that aim to enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of influenza, SARS, and MERS — so-called ‘gain-of-function’ studies — while they pause to consider the risks and benefits. But whether months, or even years, of careful deliberation can provide clarity on the issue remains to be seen. The question may simply be unanswerable. “I suspect that no one, not even WHO [the World Health Organization], has done a quantitative risk-benefit analysis of H5N1 research because it cannot be done,” writes virologist Vincent Racaniello. “What basic research will reveal is frequently unknown – if the outcome could be predicted, then it would not be research. Scientists ask questions, and design experiments to answer them, but the results remain elusive until the experiments are done. How can the benefits be quantified if the outcome isn’t certain?”

***

All photos by Jeff Miller/ UW-Madison

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/11/behind-the-steel-door/feed/7Of Cops and Shotshttp://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/10/of-cops-and-shots/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/10/of-cops-and-shots/#commentsTue, 10 Feb 2015 09:00:52 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9306[…]]]>The room is plain and cloaked in shadow, save the single pool of light draped over a hardened criminal. Facing the her is a meaty lug of a detective with a ketchup-stained tie and hairy knuckles.

“This doesn’t have to go bad for you, Jenny,” the larger man growls. “You work with us and I can put in a good word with the D.A. Get you a deal.” Jenny stares hard at the wall-size mirror across from him.

“Look, Jenny,” says a skinnier cop sitting near the door, “if you don’t flip on your cousins, your kid’s looking at a life sentence of autism. That’s hard time. Jenny’s hand flinches almost imperceptibly at the word “autism” but she kept her stare fixed.

The fat man jumps in, as if on cue. “But you implicate your cousin Tony and his gang, you’re looking at – worst case scenario – a little measles for the kid. Hell, chances are, he walks outta here free and clear.”

“So what do you say?” the other one says. “Better yet, what do you think Tony will say? Hey, we got him in the next room. Maybe we offer him the same deal, see where it gets us. I bet he turns on you before I even finish asking.”

The detective lumbers to the door and without turning says, “When your little boy’s got autism, don’t say we never gave you a choice.” As he pulls the door, a voice behind him squeaks.

“Wait. Wait, don’t. Come back. My kid can’t do autism. Let’s talk.”

And there you have it, one of the most important and enduring ideas in all of game theory: The Prisoner’s Dilemma. For those who missed A Beautiful Mind, game theory is a field that tries to quantify the various strategies that humans use every day to shape society.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is one of the field’s most enduring and interesting paradoxes. It shows how – even when it’s in their best interest to work as a team – totally rational people will go it alone and screw everybody involved. It’s a surprisingly powerful tool for understanding and predicting all manner of human behavior. Entire economies have risen and crashed based on it and, as you probably guessed, it perfectly explains our current predicament with the anti-vaccine movement.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma provides a very basic quandary. If every member of the gang keeps his mouth shut, they all get a slap on the wrist. If everyone squeals, they all go to the slammer. But – and here it gets tricky – if one of them blabs to the cops, he gets off scot free while his buddies go away for a really long time.

It looks a little like this:

Now, what does this have to do with economies and vaccines? Whether you are talking about two guys in jail, a city, state or a massive country, the Prisoner’s Dilemma shows that a sizable segment of the population will sell out their neighbors when the going gets rough.

This idea is often called “free riderism,” which is easily my favorite “ism” so far in 2015. Free riders take all kinds of forms. A free rider may be that roommate who never cleans up but gets to live in a clean house. In class, it’s the guy who skips working on a group project but takes the A with the rest of the group.

On a national stage, free riding can be disastrous. Tax evaders are free riders because they don’t pay for, say, our national defense but get protected from invasion anyway. In another classic dilemma, free riders graze their sheep on common pasture land but take a little extra time – maybe sneaking out at night, leading to collapse and no or diminished pasture for everyone.

Similarly, when everyone gets vaccinated, we all benefit from “herd immunity” and a lot less smallpox or polio. In much the same way, we lose our herd immunity — which protects infants and those who can’t get vaccinated — when immunizations levels drop below 90%.

So the anti-vaxxers have chosen an anti-social path over a pro-social one. By not shouldering their portion of the load (getting shots with minimal risk), they have increased the risk for the rest of the gang. But in the mind of an antivaxxer, keeping your mouth shut (ie: getting a child vaccinated) is a bigger risk than blabbing (avoiding the shots.

So why does game theory go to such lengths to draw out bizarre analogies? Well, once you understand a societal glitch like this, you can prescibe a solution. And as it happens, game theory provides four ways out of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The first is obvious – simply correct the mistake that creates the problem in the first place. Make the antivaxxers understand that there is no danger from vaccines. It would be a little like a lawyer breaking in on the interrogation and telling Jenny that the cops don’t have a case. No danger, no difficult choice, problem solved.

But I sense that if that was going to happen it would have before now. The second would be community cohesion. Instead of a lawyer coming in, it would be Jenny’s mom telling her she has to take the fall for the good of the family. Loyalty kicks in and she fesses up (and gets the shots, much the way Americans did with the early polio vaccines, which were also seen as dangerous). This would mean that anti-vaxxers would have to admit that vaccines – while still dangerous in their minds – are a necessary way to prevent epidemics.

Sadly, this only works in a cohesive group, like a family. These days the phrase “fellow Americans” doesn’t hold the weight it once did. And given our polarized, splintered and squabbling society, I can’t think who would have enough trust from the prisoner to play the part of that lawyer (except maybe one of the leaders of the anti-vaxxer movement having the courage to reverse his/her statements).

That brings us to the third option. A government can step in and force the issue by changing the calculus. We are sort of doing this already. By banning unvaccinated kids from attending school or playgroup, we raise the cost of choosing to be a free rider and push the scales toward vaccinations. So the penalty for antisocial behavior gets higher. Of course, that also creates an incentive to lie and tell people your kid has his shots.

That brings us to the last way out of the Prisoner’s Dilemma – the nuclear option. Simply do nothing. Right now, to misinformed parents, the slim chance of a few red spots on their children’s skin seems a better risk that a lifetime of autism. But as epidemics spread and they see actual children dying of preventable diseases, the scales will shift. It’s a little like Jenny realizing that if she rolls over on her cousin, she’ll implicate herself in a second crime that will land her on death row. Now she has no choice but to go with the good of the group and hope her buddies don’t squeal.

Special thanks to Liz Vance for explaining basic economic theory on a Sunday morning.

]]>http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/10/of-cops-and-shots/feed/3I Did It Dad! I LOVE This!http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/09/i-did-it-dad-i-love-this/
http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2015/02/09/i-did-it-dad-i-love-this/#commentsMon, 09 Feb 2015 09:00:26 +0000http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/?p=9309[…]]]>
I’d been pondering the consequences of modern self-chronicling when Facebook sent me its rendering of my life in 2014. If Facebook’s Year End Review is any indication, my life boils down to this: adorable dogs, skiing, trail running and mountain biking. Lots of mountain biking.

The scenes that Facebook selected as highlights certainly were fun times, and I wake up every day feeling fortunate to live the beautiful life that I do. I’ve lived through some dark times too, so when when I’m overcome with joy, I stop to cherish the feeling. And after that, I sometimes share it on social media.

As I look over my Facebook feed, I see that this disproportionate sharing of exuberance can create a skewed sense of my life. My posts generally fall into three categories: here’s something I wrote, here’s something I love or holy crap this experience I just had was awesome! After several friends told me how wonderful my life must be, because of all those pictures of me frolicking in the mountains, I started to worry that I was coming across as a show-off or a Chris Trager type. It’s absolutely true that I’m a frequent frolicker, but the things I share in public represent only one dimension of my life. Even the highlights are just a subset, as I seek sanctuary in experiences left ephemeral and unrecorded.

Meanwhile, the internet feeds on extremes. Some people post mundane details of everyday life, but the things that really take off are infuriating, LOL cute or mind-blowingly incredible. While writing this post, I looked up a particular YouTube video, and the next thing I knew, I was deep in the rabbit hole. The clip I was looking for was amazing, but the next one was even more so. Each video upped the ante. The mountain biker dropping off a cliff was cool, but this guy pops a back flip off a crazy jump. What once seemed impossible becomes mundane on the treadmill of escalating awesomeness.

Sure, this can make for incredible cinema, but it’s only a facsimile of the experience. When we focus on the rendering, something essential is lost. There’s a reason most of us don’t film ourselves having sex. Porn is created for the audience, not for the people on screen.

I went to college with Shane McConkey, who became a renowned extreme athlete, starring in films about skiing and base jumping and sometimes combinations of the two. He died in 2009, while filming a stunt off a 2,000 foot cliff. His death was a terrible accident that wasn’t the camera’s fault. Yet I can’t help wondering if the audience’s appetite for ever-more radical and risky feats contributed in some way.

McConkey was a paid performer, but anyone sharing themselves publicly can become swayed by audience demands. The constant camera threatens to transform our lives into performances. The moment you begin composing a tweet or Instagram photo of the thing that’s unfolding is the instant you separate yourself from the here and now. You’re no longer having an experience — you’ve become an actor in your own life.

It doesn’t have to be that way. I’ve taken a ridiculous number of mountain biking photos and what I’ve noticed is that my own impulse to film arises from a desire to share, not to show off. I post all those photos from Crested Butte’s 401 trail, because it feels so good to be alive in those moments that I can’t help singing my euphoria. For a taste of what I’m talking about, take a minute and 56 seconds to watch my favorite mountain bike ride paired with the words of Henry Thoreau.

Thoreau and the 401 trail are awesome, but they’re nothing compared to my all-time favorite YouTube video, which shows a 4-year-old kid riding a mountain bike track with his dad. As he steers his bike down a steep ramp, little Malcolm engages in a some self-talk. “I’m doing it! I did it Dad! I love this!”

The clip has an authenticity that can’t be faked. The glee in Malcolm’s voice captures a magical awakening. We are watching this kid discover his own capabilities in real time. This is the point-of-view camera at its best.

I can imagine Malcom 20 years from now, sitting in an office, stumbling upon that video on whatever YouTube has become by then, and remembering the joy of that day. I hope the video will inspire him to pull his dusty mountain bike out of the garage. Because the video can rekindle his wonder, but it can’t replicate the burn in his muscles or the wind against his face. I want that kid’s older self to pedal his bike out to the woods where there are no cameras watching him. I want him to feel like Evil Knievel and not worry about whether he looks more like Napoleon Dynamite.